The streets

One of the things that separates the New World from the Old is the layout of our cities. A New World City, like New York, Sydney, or Vancouver, has a linear, grid-like layout. Easy to navigate, nicely symmetrical, dull as ditchwater. Even if the surrounding landscape is chaotic, the New World city imposes on nature in a very rigid, linear manner.

Old World Cities, like Prague or London, are a bit more chaotic. The cityscape is stunning but organic, layer upon layer, with no apparent overriding pattern or plan. London, in particular, exemplifies this, with different aesthetics and eras overlapping one another within a few streets.

While the linear streets of the Americas and the Antipodes have a sense of masculine order imposed upon nature, the streets of my neighbourhood here in Northwest Kent are more organic and feminine, moving with rather than against local geography. They curve and curl and twist, following the contours of the hills that dominate the area. When I run, it is never in a straight line or on the flat. I have to follow curling streets that loop around or curl back on themselves, that climb steeply or fall away precipitately.

Running the streets of my immediate neighbourhood is always an adventure, an exploration. You can stumble upon a house built on the edge of a precipice, with a garden that falls or climbs madly from the back door or climbs around at weird, tortuous angles. Some houses abut the street at the first floor, others have front doors high above the footfall of mere mortals. Some would be a safe haven in heavy rain but a nightmare in snow. A few flood regularly. All allow impossibly epic views across the valley, catching dawn and sunset spectacularly.

And always, as a runner, you have to learn to run the hills as they curve and swoop. You learn to love the sudden steep inclines while craving the brief moment of the flat or the gentle downhill as your burning lungs and legs demand a brief respite. Never do you get bored. Never does the view fail to surprise or excite. The urban never felt so organic to me. Never felt so much like the woodlands about this tiny, hidden suburb of a London satellite town.

I grew to love these streets over two years of lockdowns during the Covid pandemic. They were my bolt hole, my source of escape and surprise. To discover that I lived in a place of such strange yet mundane majesty was a surprise. I had dismissed my dormitory town as a sleepy place, one of absence rather than presence, of boredom rather than surprise. Now I have come to love it as a place of constant fresh discovery, a challenge to heart and leg and lung as I pound the streets at sunrise and sunset.